There is a wonderful creative community on facebook - 52 Week Illustration Challenge. It's called a challenge, because we each challenge ourselves to produce an illustration every week following a prompt set by the group's admin. I think of it as a community because there is a huge amount of support and encouragement amongst its members to have faith in our work and to grow as artists. (There I said it, 'artist'!)

Saturday, 20 June 2015

Week 24 - Calendar*

Two imagesWhen a tree is cut you can see the years of its life, each ring representing what the tree experienced in a sort of radial calendar.This is my life as a tree. My birthday falls in this week's challenge and so I am able to complete 47 rings. It is by no means a comprehensive autobiography, but represents the things that came to me first about each year as I wrote and drew.I started as a twinkle in my mother's eye and my last ring includes the 52 week illustration challenge.To read it you would have to zoom in pretty close, but I wonder if you need to? (I don't mind if you do - it's not quite the 'no holds barred' that Tracey Emin might have given you!)

I have been asked to do some as commissions.

We would need to discuss the words, this could take about an hour. I would then need to create the art and have it printed, a two week turn around time is needed. Please contact me by email if you have an enquiry.

I'm posting the pictures for this week's prompt in reverse order. The one above caused quite a stir so I thought I'd get that one out of the way first.

edit - this was one of Tanya's picks for the calendar prompt on #illo52weeks!

Over the last couple of weeks the prompt of 'calendar' was looming and I wasn't looking forward to it. All I could think of were the stock clip art images and I really wanted to do something different. I quickly dismissed Stonehenge as I knew it would be popular idea. I went round in circles in my head. As it turns out that is quite a good metaphor as both images I made are circular.The idea of using tree rings came to me after hours of investigating the Chinese zodiac animals. I was all ready to make 12 red tangrams until I found out how the cat had been cheated out of its place. Now I want to make an illustration to depict this but need more mulling it over time. Somehow in all this I was thinking about all the ways years are depicted tree rings popped into my head - and in the process of how to put my spin on it I came up with what you have seen above.

The first illustration I did is posted below. I wanted to show the year through the seasons through plants and flowers but chickened out of that through lack of skill and decided to simplify and show the seasons in colour adding significant natural occurrences such as the sun's solstice and equinox. This led me to the Mayan and Pagan calenders - and I wanted to do something new, so back to simple!Simple is harder than it looks. Ideally it would have been created digitally, but again, I don't actually know how to do that!So here is my year in months and seasons in colour. Watercolour, pencil and a bit of tweaking in Photoshop.